“Well, that’s Mr. Grundy in one mood—and it puts Mrs. Grundy—She’s a
much-maligned person, Ponderevo—a rake at heart—and it puts her in a
most painful state of fluster—most painful! She’s an amenable creature.
When Grundy tells her things are shocking, she’s shocked—pink and
breathless. She goes about trying to conceal her profound sense of
guilt behind a haughty expression....
“Grundy, meanwhile, is in a state of complete whirlabout. Long lean
knuckly hands pointing and gesticulating! ‘They’re still thinking of
things—thinking of things! It’s dreadful. They get it out of books. I
can’t imagine where they get it! I must watch! There’re people over
there whispering! Nobody ought to whisper!—There’s something suggestive
in the mere act! Then, pictures! In the museum—things too dreadful for
words. Why can’t we have pure art—with the anatomy all wrong and pure
and nice—and pure fiction pure poetry, instead of all this stuff with
allusions—allusions?... Excuse me! There’s something up behind that
locked door! The keyhole! In the interests of public morality—yes, Sir,
as a pure good man—I insist—_I’ll_ look—it won’t hurt me—I insist on
looking my duty—M’m’m—the keyhole!’”
He kicked his legs about extravagantly, and I laughed again.
“That’s Grundy in one mood, Ponderevo. It isn’t Mrs. Grundy. That’s one
of the lies we tell about women. They’re too simple. Simple! Woman ARE
simple! They take on just what men tell ’em.”
Ewart meditated for a space. “Just exactly as it’s put to them,” he
said, and resumed the moods of Mr. Grundy.
“Then you get old Grundy in another mood. Ever caught him nosing,
Ponderevo? Mad with the idea of mysterious, unknown, wicked, delicious
things. Things that aren’t respectable. Wow! Things he mustn’t do!...
Any one who knows about these things, knows there’s just as much
mystery and deliciousness about Grundy’s forbidden things as there is
about eating ham. Jolly nice if it’s a bright morning and you’re well
and hungry and having breakfast in the open air. Jolly unattractive if
you’re off colour. But Grundy’s covered it all up and hidden it and put
mucky shades and covers over it until he’s forgotten it. Begins to
fester round it in his mind. Has dreadful struggles—with himself about
impure thoughts.... Then you set Grundy with hot ears,—curious in
undertones. Grundy on the loose, Grundy in a hoarse whisper and with
furtive eyes and convulsive movements—making things indecent.
Evolving—in dense vapours—indecency!
“Grundy sins. Oh, yes, he’s a hypocrite. Sneaks round a corner and sins
ugly. It’s Grundy and his dark corners that make vice, vice! We
artists—we have no vices.
“And then he’s frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to fallen
women and decent harmless sculptors of the simple nude—like me—and so
back to his panic again.”
“Mrs. Grundy, I suppose, doesn’t know he sins,” I remarked.
“No? I’m not so sure.... But, bless her heart she’s a woman.... She’s a
woman. Then again you get Grundy with a large greasy smile—like an
accident to a butter tub—all over his face, being Liberal Minded—Grundy
in his Anti-Puritan moments, ‘trying not to see Harm in it’—Grundy the
friend of innocent pleasure. He makes you sick with the Harm he’s
trying not to see in it...
“And that’s why everything’s wrong, Ponderevo. Grundy, damn him! stands
in the light, and we young people can’t see. His moods affect us. We
catch his gusts of panic, his disease of nosing, his greasiness. We
don’t know what we may think, what we may say, he does his silly utmost
to prevent our reading and seeing the one thing, the one sort of
discussion we find—quite naturally and properly—supremely interesting.
So we don’t adolescence; we blunder up to sex. Dare—dare to look—and he
may dirt you for ever! The girls are terror-stricken to silence by his
significant whiskers, by the bleary something in his eyes.”
Suddenly Ewart, with an almost Jack-in-the-box effect, sat up.
“He’s about us everywhere, Ponderevo,” he said, very solemnly.
“Sometimes—sometimes I think he is—in our blood. In _mine_.”
He regarded me for my opinion very earnestly, with his pipe in the
corner of his mouth.
“You’re the remotest cousin he ever had,” I said.
I reflected. “Look here, Ewart,” I asked, “how would you have things
different?”
He wrinkled up his queer face, regarded the wait and made his pipe
gurgle for a space, thinking deeply.
“There are complications, I admit. We’ve grown up under the terror of
Grundy and that innocent but docile and—yes—formidable lady, his wife.
I don’t know how far the complications aren’t a disease, a sort of
bleaching under the Grundy shadow.... It is possible there are things I
have still to learn about women.... Man has eaten of the Tree of
Knowledge. His innocence is gone. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
We’re in for knowledge; let’s have it plain and straight. I should
begin, I think, by abolishing the ideas of decency and indecency....”
“Grundy would have fits!” I injected.
“Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douches—publicly—if the sight was
not too painful—three times a day.... But I don’t think, mind you, that
I should let the sexes run about together. No. The fact behind the
sexes—is sex. It’s no good humbugging. It trails about—even in the best
mixed company. Tugs at your ankle. The men get showing off and
quarrelling—and the women. Or they’re bored. I suppose the ancestral
males have competed for the ancestral females ever since they were both
some sort of grubby little reptile. You aren’t going to alter that in a
thousand years or so.... Never should you have a mixed company,
never—except with only one man or only one woman. How would that be?...
“Or duets only?...
“How to manage it? Some rule of etiquette, perhaps.”... He became
portentously grave.
Then his long hand went out in weird gestures.
“I seem to see—I seem to see—a sort of City of Women, Ponderevo.
Yes.... A walled enclosure—good stone-mason’s work—a city wall, high as
the walls of Rome, going about a garden. Dozens of square miles of
garden—trees—fountains—arbours—lakes. Lawns on which the women play,
avenues in which they gossip, boats.... Women like that sort of thing.
Any woman who’s been to a good eventful girls’ school lives on the
memory of it for the rest of her life. It’s one of the pathetic things
about women—the superiority of school and college—to anything they get
afterwards. And this city-garden of women will have beautiful places
for music, places for beautiful dresses, places for beautiful work.
Everything a woman can want. Nurseries. Kindergartens. Schools. And no
man—except to do rough work, perhaps—ever comes in. The men live in a
world where they can hunt and engineer, invent and mine and
manufacture, sail ships, drink deep and practice the arts, and fight—”
“Yes,” I said, “but—”
He stilled me with a gesture.
“I’m coming to that. The homes of the women, Ponderevo, will be set in
the wall of their city; each woman will have her own particular house
and home, furnished after her own heart in her own manner—with a little
balcony on the outside wall. Built into the wall—and a little balcony.
And there she will go and look out, when the mood takes her, and all
round the city there will be a broad road and seats and great shady
trees. And men will stroll up and down there when they feel the need of
feminine company; when, for instance, they want to talk about their
souls or their characters or any of the things that only women will
stand.... The women will lean over and look at the men and smile and
talk to them as they fancy. And each woman will have this; she will
have a little silken ladder she can let down if she chooses—if she
wants to talk closer...”
“The men would still be competing.”
“There perhaps—yes. But they’d have to abide by the women’s decisions.”
I raised one or two difficulties, and for a while we played with this
idea.
“Ewart,” I said, “this is like Doll’s Island.
“Suppose,” I reflected, “an unsuccessful man laid siege to a balcony
and wouldn’t let his rival come near it?”
“Move him on,” said Ewart, “by a special regulation. As one does
organ-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid it—make
it against the etiquette. No life is decent without etiquette.... And
people obey etiquette sooner than laws...”
“H’m,” I said, and was struck by an idea that is remote in the world of
a young man. “How about children?” I asked; “in the City? Girls are all
very well. But boys, for example—grow up.”
“Ah!” said Ewart. “Yes. I forgot. They mustn’t grow up inside....
They’d turn out the boys when they were seven. The father must come
with a little pony and a little gun and manly wear, and take the boy
away. Then one could come afterwards to one’s mother’s balcony.... It
must be fine to have a mother. The father and the son...”
“This is all very pretty in its way,” I said at last, “but it’s a
dream. Let’s come back to reality. What I want to know is, what are you
going to do in Brompton, let us say, or Walham Green _now?_”
“Oh! damn it!” he remarked, “Walham Green! What a chap you are,
Ponderevo!” and he made an abrupt end to his discourse. He wouldn’t
even reply to my tentatives for a time.
“While I was talking just now,” he remarked presently,
“I had a quite different idea.”
“What?”
“For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Cæsars. Only not
heads, you know. We don’t see the people who do things to us
nowadays...”
“How will you do it, then?”
“Hands—a series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth Century. I’ll do
it. Some day some one will discover it—go there—see what I have done,
and what is meant by it.”
“See it where?”
“On the tombs. Why not? The Unknown Master of the Highgate Slope! All
the little, soft feminine hands, the nervous ugly males, the hands of
the flops, and the hands of the snatchers! And Grundy’s loose, lean,
knuckly affair—Grundy the terror!—the little wrinkles and the thumb!
Only it ought to hold all the others together—in a slightly disturbing
squeeze....Like Rodin’s great Hand—you know the thing!”